While the East Haven case made headlines, James Rawlings, the head of the Greater New Haven NAACP, noted on Thursday that profiling remains a large issue in the black community.

"Everyone in this room knows the areas where we get stopped all the time," he said at an NAACP meeting.

Representatives from the ACLU and FBI were invited speakers at the monthly meeting.

But Rawlings pressed them for answers on another topic of importance in the black community: Title VII of the federal Civil Rights Act and a potential challenge of its constitutionality by a local attorney.

The law prohibits employment discrimination based on race, gender, religion and other factors.

Karen Torre, a lawyer for a group of white firefighters who won a discrimination case and promotions at the U.S. Supreme Court, has indicated she intends to challenge the constitutionality of certain municipal provisions of Title VII.

Rawlings expressed concern what that would mean "in New Haven and across America" and pledged the NAACP would fight any effort

On a state level, Staub asserted the implementation of the Alvin W. Penn Racial Profiling Prohibition Act a decade ago failed "miserably." Many local police departments failed to report data on the race of stopped motorists and when they did the information came in such a variety of incompatible forms that it was meaningless.